In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Damon Deaner, the Director of Employee Experience & Design at IBM.

Damon’s superpower is blending design and technology. He now applies his superpower by using design and tech to enable people experience.

Damon started his journey in design thinking in 2012 when IBM announced that they would bring design back and build a culture of design thinking. Damon joined the newly formed design organization and helped bring developers, engineers, and designers together to use design thinking. From there, he ended up leading all design talent at IBM and conducted several employee lifecycle projects. That caught the attention of the CHRO and eventually Damon was asked to join the HR team to build an employee experience practice.

The impact of building a culture of design thinking at IBM was felt almost immediately. The organization invited Forrester Research to conduct a study to quantify the impact design thinking had on their business. Results included 2x faster time-to-market with teams that were applying design thinking, 75% reduced design time, and 33% reduced development time.

The HR organization at IBM has also started to embrace design thinking. At this point, 4,000 HR professionals have been credentialed as design thinking practitioners or coaches. The next step for Damons’ team was to help HR professionals to apply the method to the employee experience.

The team started with user research and found that employees felt that HR programs and processes felt very fragmented and confusing. What was driving this was that the HR organization was optimized for efficiency, and not for experience. So, the team decided to apply design thinking to tackle this challenge. They brought HR representatives from different functions together to lead a project to co-create an employee experience playbook which included resources, voice/tone/visual guidelines, and guidance around the different digital and physical channels that can be used to engage with employees. They also created a design thinking toolkit that included methods, templates, and activities to help accelerate the application of design thinking in Human Resources.

Leadership advocacy, both from the business as well as the CHRO, has been a huge success factor in being able to build and sustain a culture of design thinking in HR at IBM. A key lesson that IBM HR learned was the importance of bringing in the “user” employee as a co-creator in the design process.

In terms of measuring impact, the approach the team took was to identify key moments that matter to employees and its impact on business outcomes and (E)NPS levels. Once activities were rolled out to address pain points, the team then measured how these metrics improved.

Want to learn more about how IBM built design thinking capability in HR? Watch the entire interview on YouTube or listen to the Podcast.